The Skinny

Pirates shall partner with an Enterprise to build a disruptive startup - Kurate - that will enable the Enterprise to acquire millennial users in large numbers before they enter the sales funnel of a large competitor in the groceries industry.

Millennials spend more on “experiences” than “things”. Yet grocery shopping feels more like shopping for “things” than for “experiences”. Whether it’s buying in a retail store, or ordering online or subscribing to a meal kit, the user experience is mostly about groceries, ingredients and meals, rather than about lifestyle.

Kurate makes grocery shopping an engaging, easy and efficient lifestyle curation experience. Kurate bridges the gap between what groceries/meals a user shops for and how it furthers her/his lifestyle goals.

By embedding itself deeply in a user’s lifestyle curation, Kurate can become a high growth high margin business.

As easy as browsing Instagram

As users browse through food and lifestyle posts on their Instagram feed, they tag Kurate on posts they like - Fine dining pictures, snaps of home cooked meals, workout videos, travel posts and more.

Kurate algorithms go to work

The Kurate algorithms create different data tags for each user based on her/his Kuration on Instagram. The algorithms use data and machine learning techniques to understand the user’s lifestyle choices and make inferences on what food/groceries the user might like.

Kurators

Kurators are a network of food bloggers, nutritionists and other food experts contracted by Kurate. They prepare personalized grocery lists for users. They use their expertise in addition to the Kurate algorithms based on the user's Kuration choices.

Smart Lists

Each list contains groceries, recipes and lifestyle fit information. The user experience will be transformed from the ugly process of calorie counting to the fun process of seeing how each meal fits her/his lifestyle choices.

Every list is prepared personally for a user by a Kurator using her/his expertise and the lifestyle goals prepared by the Kurate algorithms.

Delivery/Pickup

The user can order the selected smart list and choose to have the groceries delivered by the Enterprise’s Delivery option or pick them up at a store of the Enterprise using the Enterprise’s Pickup option.

Step closer to your lifestyle of choice

The essence of Kurate is to quantify and show users how aligned they are with their lifestyle goals that they're creating by Kurating posts on Instagram.

A user's lifestyle goals are created by Kurate's data science and machine learning algorithms. The Kurator creates lists for the user based on these goals.

The users will be able to see how close they are moving to their goals by shopping the Kurated lists. When a user sees tangible movement towards her/his goals over time, it'll drive a deeper bond between the user and the Kurator and increased transaction rates for the user.

While the first 10-20 Kurators will be hired by Kurate, subsequent Kurators will be contracted from the network of food bloggers and experts and they will be trained to use the Kurate algorithms.

Kurators will be able to make $5/grocery list, earning them $5000 to $10000 per month, depending on the no. of Kurated grocery lists they prepare.

Over time users will be able to build a relationship with their favorite Kurators. This will enable the Kurators to further extend their following and influence among users.

The optimum Kuration fee and number of Kurators will be tweaked till the income from the Kuration fee balances out the payment to the Kurators.

Kurate will acquire users by using food bloggers and lifestyle influencers on Instagram.

In order to incentivize food bloggers to sign up users, Kurate will build a series of tools that will help bloggers earn more revenue in their core food blogging business.

These tools will help bloggers quantify things like

• how much reach they can have among the Kurate user base with their Instagram posts

• how much revenue each new Instagram post can generate for them

Kurate is neither a membership service nor a subscription service. So the value of a Kurate user is not like a subscription service user like Netflix nor like a membership service user like Amazon prime. While a subscription service user has a lot of predictability in generating recurring revenues, she/he doesn't have much upsell potential. A membership service user, on the contrary, has high upsell potential but poor recurring revenues beyond the one time membership fee.

Most grocery businesses, in reinventing themselves for the digital world, tend to focus on valuing their users in either one of the two ways mentioned above.

We believe that Kurate users should be valued based on the number of transactions they generate - the way Uber values its users. Thinking of valuing Kurate users this way puts the focus on the user engagement and converting the user engagement into transactions. Every variable in the equation - the Kuration fee, the no. of Kurators, the quality of lists generated etc. - will be focused on increasing the number and value of transactions.

Ownership

Initial Investment

The initial investment will be used to engage Pirates to build an MVP and acquire the first few thousand users.

The Enterprise will invest $500K